My brother Mike, whose unstated mission in life is to read every mystery and thriller ever written, has this to say on Ian Rankin’s latest, “The Naming of the Dead.” “I have to admit I was just a little disappointed. It seemed somewhat disjointed. There were some great lines there, though, some real laugh-out-loud […]
A petty crime involving fiction
I’m really not trying to make this the one true Harry Potter blog, but I have to remark on the jackass who took the trouble to (a) obtain J.K. Rowling’s latest tome days before its official release date, and (b) take a digital picture of every freaking page, for the express purpose of posting […]
Has Harry Potter cast a curse?
Rebutting the conventional wisdom that the Harry Potter phenomenon is good for reading, writing and publishing in general, Washington Post book editor Ron Charles has written a provocative essay entitled “Harry Potter and the Death of Reading.” In it, he cites a few facts to buttress his case that millions of people reading the […]
Books with covers you conceal
I’m always a little skeptical when magazines or newspapers run their perennial lists of what celebrities are reading, usually under the rubric of “guilty pleasures.” I mean, if they’re really guilty about it, they’re not going to be totally frank, are they? But Time magazine’s July 23 issue has a nice twist on this: […]
Setting in fiction: It helps if you live there
The fine blog Detectives Beyond Borders recently had a discussion about the significance of setting in crime fiction. Peter was commenting on an assertion by Clive James that many of today’s international crime novels are so crammed with geographic detail that they are essentially guidebooks. I’ve had the same reaction, most recently to “A […]
Hot air and cold fiction
There must be some cathartic force at work, to compel those of us who blog to arrange our most fleeting, insignificant thoughts as electrons on a screen. Maybe it’s a desire for connection, like casting a bottle into the sea in the hope that some sympathetic soul will retrieve it. Or not. Maybe we […]
The seven stages of blogging:
This is a rough description of my thinking over the last couple of weeks. Having reached stage seven already, it may be time to regroup. Not sure what I was thinking, devoting a blog to crime fiction when there are so many excellent ones already out there. Perhaps I’ll change the focus to late-50s […]